Abigail (18 page)

Laon brought his books around the very next day. Nora had not looked at them above a minute before she smelled a rat.

People who worked for her asked her how she did it. Once, for a wager, John had got a City accountant to doctor a set of books—for an imaginary company, of course—in which the embezzlement was as perfectly buried as human ingenuity could manage. It had taken Nora the best part of a day but she had found it. “How did you do it?” the accountant asked, echoing a hundred others.

The only way Nora had ever been able to explain it was by a parallel. “Imagine a chess game,” she would say, “between two first-rate players. Suppose you stop it halfway and then move a piece—a pawn, say—just one square. A trivial little move that most ordinary players wouldn’t even notice. But ask another master of the game to look at the board and he’d sniff something wrong at once. He’d tell you that there was no possible play between first-rate players that would result in such a board. He might even put the pawn back where it belonged and say, ‘Now if that pawn were
there…
!’ Well, that’s how I am with account books that have been tampered with. I smell it at once, however long it takes me to run it down.”

Laon knew none of this when he presented his books to Nora. And she did not want him to know until she had all his accounts there; these were only his publishing records.

“You are your own printer, too, are you not, Mr. Laon?” she asked.

“It’s a separate company, Countess.”

“Nevertheless you own both?”

He agreed he did.

“Then—though this is plainly a farce, for these accounts look immaculate to me—I think for completeness’ sake, and to satisfy the dear girl, I had better see the printing accounts, too.”

His face fell—confirmation enough of his guilt. And he redoubled her certainty of fraud when he took back his publishing accounts. Obviously that was to enable him to doctor the printer’s accounts so that both told the same lie. With a hunter’s relish she waited for him to return the following day. At last she would have solid evidence against Laon to lay before Abigail.

He was most ill at ease when he came back with the books next day; had someone breathed her reputation to him?

“Lady Wharfedale,” he said with a strong tremor in his voice, “I obviously cannot bind you to such a promise in advance. But when you have satisfied yourself as to these accounts, I am going to ask you to promise never to reveal to Lady Abigail what you have seen—nor anything you think you may have discovered.”

I’ll bet you are!
Nora thought.

Five minutes later she was ready to confess that these were the most bewildering accounts she had seen for years. They were doctored; there was no doubt of that. But she could see no way in which Laon had benefited from the doctoring.

“You seem to have made no profit at all as a publisher,” she said.

“Yes,” he said in a voice eager to persuade. “Here, see!”

“But no,” she said. “That actually belongs here.” And she turned to the ledgers of the printing company. “And see—it is exactly wiped out by these three entries.
Exactly.
Now, how can that be? In truth, you have made no profit at all—either as publisher or as printer. These books smell worse than all Billingsgate Fish Mart. Yet they reveal you not as a swindler but as a fool.”

“Damn!” he burst out. Then he turned red and apologized. But when he saw she was not really shocked, he said it again. “Damn! She might have told me how good you are at it!”

“But…” Nora laughed, still completely baffled. “The only person who has made any money out of it at all is…” Her voice trailed off as enlightenment reached her at last. “Abigail!” She waved her hands over the books. “You’ve given it
all
to her.” She was shocked.

Miserably he nodded.

“But why? To entice her away from us?”

Now it was Laon who was stung to shock. “Of course not! I simply did not wish to make a profit from her. I took care to make no loss—as you have discovered—but I have also made no profit.”

“Because you love her?”

He looked angrily at her. “Did you need to say that? And now I must ask you to make that promise, please?”

“But why?”

“Because I do not wish her to know. It would cheapen the whole thing.”

“If it came from you, yes. But not from me, surely?”

“Please, Lady Wharfedale, I do not want her to know. It is best if she believes we have normal business relations as far as her writing goes. It is important for her to believe that. Just as it is important for me to know I have not profited by her. This”—he pointed at the book—“reconciles those demands.”

Nora smiled. “Does it! I could show you a dozen ways of doing it less clumsily. But I apologize to you, Mr. Laon. You are obviously a man of fine feelings.”

Laon also smiled. “What did you really expect? That I was making money out of her?”

Nora shrugged.

“Really!” he said. “Making money is no problem. At least, I have never found it so.”

“Come, Mr. Laon! You sound more eligible by the minute.”

He barely noticed her compliment. “But Abigail!” he said, more to himself than to her. “She is unique. There has never been, and never will be again, such a girl as her.”

And Nora, who had feared for Abigail’s vulnerability and Abigail’s capacity for pain, now saw that the boot was on the other foot.

“Poor boy,” she said. It was almost a whisper.

“She will not marry me, you know.”

“She is still young. Here.” Nora touched her own heart.

He looked at her with his dark, piercing eyes. “Help me,” he begged.

And Nora, to her own utter astonishment, heard herself saying, “Of course I will.”

Later she wondered what on earth could have induced her to such agreement. Of course she would not honour it; but now, more than ever, she worried for Abigail in her dealings with this man.

You’ll never guess what,” Laon said that Friday evening. “Rossetti thinks
I
am the Abbot!”

Abigail joined his laughter until she realized it was not entirely at Rossetti’s expense, nor at the exquisiteness of their secret; it was at his own cleverness—that he was the sort of person who could be mistaken for the Abbot even by someone as perceptive as Rossetti. It seemed to her then that she was the victim of a trick, that something precious had been filched from her. But it was only a passing feeling, and Laon was so charming and attentive she soon forgot.

“How’s Mr. Oldale?” she asked Annie, who came to supervise the clearing of the banquet.

Annie pulled a sour face. “I’ve seen ostriches fly better,” she said. But then she laughed, so Abigail understood it was nothing serious, especially as Annie left them alone with a solemn wink.

They were in each other’s arms at once, almost bruising their lips with the passion of their kisses. Again she revelled at the sweetly aching emptiness he made at the very centre of her, felt her breathing turn to disorder.

In the midst of this abandon he said, “Tell me what it’s like.”

“What?”

“Oh, please, Abbie darling! I have never known a girl like you. No one has ever had this effect on me. I want to share it. I want to know it all. Please?” His dark eyes, so full of pain and hope, held her pinned to his will. “Help me!”

For this dinner she had not put on her evening gown with its fashionable low-cut bodice and yoke of lace (and its myriad hooks and buttons). Instead she wore a much simpler, flowing gown of her own devising. Its inspiration was Pre-Raphaelite—very much the “aniline-dyed druid costume” the Abbot had mocked. At a distance, and in silhouette, she might have been taken for a Quaker girl in an older sister’s dress; but no Quaker girl ever wore such lustrous silks, so richly amber in colour. She reached a hand inside, where she hoped his hand might have strayed, and delicately eased out a button she hoped his fingers might have discovered.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Telling you.”

“Not that way.”

“It is the only way I can.”

“Telling me what? Say it!”

“That I love you. That love sanctifies us. That I feel no shame. That I am yours in every way and always. That we might do anything—things that in words might seem shameful—and we would make them glory.”

She had meant to say “holy” and could not understand why she had blurted out “glory,” with all its overtones of battle and victory.

Gently he pulled her hand from the folds of her gown; gently he took her back in his arms; gently he murmured into her ear, making her thrill again at the vibrant nearness of him, “I’m sorry, darling. It’s just…I want to know you better than I know myself, better than anyone ever knew any other being. You are the warmest, loveliest, most breathtaking, most captivating, sweetest, brightest, most astonishing girl who ever lived. You are magical. The whole world is different just because you are in it. Wherever you go, the stones and trees beside your path—the very air you walk through—are all transformed, because they have shared a little in the rarity of you.”

His hands invaded the folds of her sleeves and, finding no resistance, were soon caressing her shoulders and shoulder blades and, through her chemise, her spine.

“That’s what it’s like to be me,” he said. “Heaven and hell. And the hell of it is
not
knowing you—not
being
you. What is it like to
be
you?”

The room dissolved in a shimmering; her voice became a quicksand for her own self-possession. “I don’t know,” she stammered. “You must help me—to find out.”

She threw herself back on the divan and, with clumsy urgency, began to undo the inner buttons between her neck and waist, until his grip stayed her. He lay mostly on the divan, only slightly upon her, and gently parted the long, open folds of her bodice, kissing the line of her jaw, her cheekbones, her ears, running his lips down her long, slender neck.

His fingertips, and sometimes his fingernails, strayed where her body lay peeled—over her shoulders, her arms, her ribs, down her breastbone, to the taut skin of her stomach—everywhere but her breasts. She shivered until the divan itself turned to jelly; her heartbeat was a thunderous ripple, in her scalp, in her toes. A strange, glowing fluid seemed to irrigate her, a solvent of all her senses. It reached into everything, every part, uniting in a way she had never before experienced—a mysterious sweetness that felt like strength yet left her overcome with drowsiness.

“Please!” she begged, not knowing what she begged. “Oh, please!”

“Yes!” he promised, not knowing what he promised.

His fingers stole to the edge of her breast. She drew a deep breath; her lost voice meandered in and out of her breathing.

His hand covered her breast. At once that inward glow turned to incandescence. A distant cry, her own, echoed through the sudden infinity she had become. Delight so great it was also a terror seized her, again and again—then there was a quick and overwhelming fear of death.

She knew—beyond certainty she knew—that she was close to death. Her skin burned in uneven flushes. Her heart would not beat; it squirmed in its weakness. She pulled his hand off her and crept at once into his embrace, straining herself to him, wanting to die in his arms.

Now his hands comforted her, dowsing the fires that had turned to terror, gently easing apart that awe-full unity, restoring all the separate parts of her body to her own possession.

“There,” he said, kissing her salt-soaked cheeks.

Feeling hot she drew away from him and blew down her front to cool herself. Where her skin had burned there were lingering patches of discolour. “Something is wrong with me,” she said.

“Mmmm?”

She repeated herself in more matter-of-fact tones.

“I’ll poison any doctor who confirms it,” he said. His voice was lethargic, all his movements leaden; he was only half awake.

“Seriously,” she said. “I just had a seizure of some kind. Epilepsy. Or a heart attack.”

He laughed, a comatose attempt at a hearty laugh, and hugged her to him. “Oh, Abbie, Abbie! I love you.”

“What?” She did not like to be unwittingly funny.

“Don’t you understand?”

“You saw the Great God Pan,” he said. “And so,” he added, pointing at a damp mark on his pantaloons, “did I.”

When Abigail went to Annie’s boudoir to tidy herself, she tried to explain what had happened—and found herself hesitating and stammering as if she had to say it in a language she had only half mastered. She—the writer whose sales were rivalling those of Dickens, the journalist no editor had yet refused to print—could not begin to describe what had just happened to her.

“Blimey!” Annie said. “And all he did was touch you? There?”

“Yes.”

“You must love him, gel. That’s all about it.”

“Is it? Why?”

“Didn’t you like it?”

“I don’t know. It gave me such a fright.”

“First time? Never happened before?”

“Never. What was it, Annie?”

“Next time you’ll be expecting it. Then you’ll see.”

Abigail stared, trusting Annie’s words more than she understood them.

“It’s what it’s all about, gel,” Annie said.

***

August passed into September and the days were noticeably drawing in. Now and then a damp, salty mist would drift in off the Thames and make the year seem even later than it was.

They dined at Annie’s as often as they could, sometimes four nights a week. For both it was a time of marvel; they knew where it was leading; Abigail did not fear it; Laon was not consumed with impatience. Day by day each unravelled more of the mystery of the other’s body. She learned the things that gave him ecstasy and discovered where her own thrills were released. In Annie’s phrase she “saw the elephant”—saw it, felt it grow, held its gristle, squeezed its sinew, contained its throb, and looked in wonder at the starchy residue on her fingers.

She realized this was the stuff with the power to quicken her. She had no idea how; but that only made it more magic and potent. She feared it. But the fear was not of mere social death; it was of something deeper and far, far more ancient.

And Pepe feared her, too. She could sense that. He approached her body with a sort of awe that was only part in worship; the other part was dread. She would catch him staring into her eyes as a man might stare at a bomb whose appointed hour for explosion has come and gone. Then
he
was the rabbit; though she did not feel one whit more like the cat.

With time these taut moments began to slacken. The fear, the novelty, the awkwardness all diminished. The magic remained. Though their love was, as yet, unconsummated, and therefore ought to have been tense with anticipation, she found she could relax—even bask—in his sexuality, without fear, without anxiety, and with a longing untinged by desperation.

“When?” she asked once, in that rich language that had grown between them, threadbare only in its words.

“When we need to,” he said. “Soon.”

But as “soon” drew near, his proposals of marriage became more insistent—as if he were hoping to make the one act conditional upon the other. He did not press, nor did he grow angry; but his quiet resignation, his sadness, which he took no pains to hide, cut her to the quick. She grieved for him that he could not see her fear of marriage and domesticity as anything but juvenile.

Fortunately it did not affect her work, nor his impartiality as her editor and agent. And as September came on, pushing back the enervating heat of August, she fell into a spate of work that extended her in every direction, from the aloof wit of the Abbot to earnest and sincere trifles on cookery (helped by Anton, her mother’s chef) for Laon’s own magazines. She came to love the wearing of all these different hats and being all these different people—insatiable people, each of whom wanted to write her (or “his”) piece and damn the others. She averaged around seven thousand words a day, which excused the fact that she was still living at home, still merely talking of moving to a place of her own.

One day, after delivering a shoal of articles and a couple of short stories to Laon, she was sauntering up the Strand, wondering what to write next, when the delicious thought stole upon her that she would write nothing at all. A crisp, early autumn sun was filling the city with silver; the overnight rain had settled the street dust. It was a perfect day in which to loaf; a day to be young in. She would buy the first book that seized her fancy, take it home, sit out on one of the balconies in the sun with the glorious throb of the city at her feet, and read it from cover to cover. The ambition was easy to achieve, for that part of the Strand was full of secondhand bookshops (not all of them quite as proper as their outside stalls would lead the casual passerby to imagine).

Some angel must have guided her steps, she afterwards felt. For the book that took her fancy (more for its rich binding than its title) was a facsimile edition of one of William Blake’s prophetic poems,
Visions of the Daughters of Albion.
Idly she opened it and read:

The golden nymph replied.

“Pluck thou my flower, Oothoon the mild,

Another flower shall spring,

Because the soul of sweet delight

Can never pass away.”

And she almost ceased to breathe.

Then Oothoon plucked the flower, saying:

“I pluck thee from thy bed,

Sweet flower, and put thee here to glow between my breasts;

And thus I turn my face to where my whole soul seeks.”

Her hair stood on end. Blake, who had lived in Fountains Court, not two hundred yards from where she now stood,
knew
! He was telling her all those things she felt and yet could not articulate.

The man did not want to sell the book to her—seemed annoyed that it had been on the stall where she had found it. But Abigail insisted. And when Abigail insisted on anything, few men could deny it her for long. She hurried home. By teatime she knew the
Visions of the Daughters of Albion
by heart. It was the textbook for her life: “All that lives is holy.”

That evening the mists off the Thames were thick and the fires that people kindled only served to make them thicker. Abigail and Laon had a fire set in their supper room at Annie’s. With the fever of Blake’s
Visions
still on her, Abigail ate lightly and the meal was soon over. Soon, too, they were lying naked, side by side in near contact, touching only with their fingertips and lips.

He was aware of this new excitement in her and she could see his eyes posing a question his tongue could not quite frame. She wished she could babble the whole poem to him in one great superword, so that he could see it the way you see a painting; she wanted him to share it, but instantly, not dragged out in time—time during which their lust would clamour, throats would dry, scalps itch, noses need blowing, fires tending, and a thousand other mundane irritations intervene.

He drew breath to speak, to stumble at that still-forming question. She leaped upon him, on all fours, straddling him, hanging over him. She spoke barely above a whisper, kissing him lightly at every pause, until he could relax no deeper.

“Thy joys are tears, thy labour vain, to form men to thine image.

How can one joy absorb another? Are not different joys

Holy, eternal, infinite; and each joy is a love?”

“What’s this?” he asked, smiling up at her in wonderment. He began to caress her spine and hips, gently, with raking fingernails.

At bay to her own desire she said urgently, “Listen. It’s for us. It’s about us: ‘
With what sense does the parson claim the labour of the farmer?
’ Forget about parsons and farmers—it’s
us
,” she insisted.

“‘What are his nets and gins and traps, and how does he surround him

With cold floods of abstraction, and with forests of solitude,

To build him castles and high spires, where kings and priests may dwell,

Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot is bound